Zip Code Guys’s Map Blog

Best and Worst Game Maps of All Time

As video game technology advances, the worlds created to be the playgrounds of sadistic manchildren become ever more complex and disturbingly realistic.  Sometimes these game maps recreate vast sprawling cities populated with hordes of people and stunning architecture.  Then sometimes they recreate vast, sprawling, unremarkable and formless blobs of landscape — the likes of which you haven’t seen since visiting your parents in the suburbs.

Assassin’s Creed

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Game Map Quality: Deep as a stiletto neck wound

Released in November of 2007, Assassin’s Creed was a third-person action-adventure that generated a lot of hype prior to its release.  Set in Crusades-era Jerusalem, Assassin’s Creed promised an epic, sweeping Gothic storyline with loads of good old fashioned Medieval violence and several flagons full of crusader blood.

Assassin’s Creed turned out to be a repetitive grind fest with a meandering plot that involved time-traveling assassins, super powers, and seemingly no idea what it was doing.  But much like pizza — sex and games set in a beautiful, rich, interactive game map — even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

The ancient cities of Assassin’s Creed were unparalleled in their depth and complexity.  Every building could be scaled, every window was a handhold and every roof was a potential escape route.  Even though the “action” often consisted of waiting to press a single button, the tense chases through the winding streets and sprawling rooftops of Jerusalem stood head and shoulders above anything gamers had seen up to that point.  Despite the fact that the gameplay suffered from a terminal case of boring and the story had a bad habit of shitting itself inside out, Assassin’s Creed managed to distinguish itself with some kick-ass cartography.

EVE Online

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Game Map Quality: Sprawling like yo’ momma’s gut

A tremendously complex MMORPG popular with people who have way too much time and love of spreadsheets, EVE is set in a massive universe where players compete for territory and resources.  Notable for its epic battles that result from giant guilds all inhabiting the same server, EVE is also notable for being really ridiculously huge.

Of course, any game set on a galactic scale is going to be huge.  Eve kind of took this idea a little too far by making its game map actually the size of a motherfucking galaxy.  With a series of warp gates, near-light-speed travel, and a sophisticated autopilot, even a mundane stop to pick up some milk at the galactic grocer’s can take a few hours.  Longer jaunts to the far corners of the known galaxy can take days.  And we’re not talking video-game “play the song of the sun and skip a few hours” days — these are real-world time scales.  You heard that right: in a game that charges by the month, most of it will be spent going from point A to point B.

Starcraft

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Game Map Quality: The grandaddy of good design

For those of you who are reading this on your great nephew’s computer and haven’t used the internet since 1998, Starcraft is kind of a big deal.  Even though it’s more than 12 years old, uses outdated graphics, and looks a little like a Second grader’s 2D diorama (in SPACE), Starcraft is still good enough to merit world championships and suicidal devotion.

However, this monolith of a game didn’t get to the top through space marines and Aliens references alone.  It succeeded through well-paced storytelling, balanced gameplay and some of the greatest game maps ever engineered.  At a time where the placements of cliffs, rocks and trees were often simply charitable suggestions as far as the technology was concerned, Starcraft stood out as being absolutely flawless in its map design.  While it’s easy to make a perfectly symmetrical map and call it multiplayer, Starcraft developers decided that was beer-league BS and instead crafted asymmetrical maps that nonetheless were exceptionally balanced — so much so that tens of thousands of dollars regularly ride on what amounts to chopping up a chess board, putting it back together in the shape of a water stain, and trusting that no player has an unfair advantage.

Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

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Game Map Quality: Finger painting on an endless canvas

Way back in 1996 when the internet consisted only of ASCII porn and goatse, Bethesda Softworks unveiled the latest installment of their popular Elder Scrolls series.  While the village elders claim that this ancient game was “kinda okay I guess”, modern man still stands mystified by its purpose.  This is mostly due to the fact that Daggerfall is the largest game map ever constructed.

Using a methodology so nerdy it will melt your pocket protectors, Daggerfall has been estimated to span an estimated 62,394 square miles.  That means, based on in-game objects of measurable size (such as an average human’s height), the game map measures about 250 miles on each side.  To put that in perspective, that means the game map of Daggerfall is larger than Tokyo, Seoul, Mexico City, New York City, Mumbai, Shanghai, Moscow, Beijing and London combined…  and with plenty of room to spare.  Why would a game possibly need all this space?  It doesn’t.  The vast majority of the terrain in Daggerfall was randomly generated filler.  The game is now available free for download from the Bethesda website so if your computer has a whopping 200 MEGABYTES of space to spare for an equation that will generate a flat, formless plain that will take you about 22 days to traverse (in real-world time), feel free.

Grand Theft Auto III

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Game Map Quality: Short and sweet

This revamping of the storied Grand Theft Auto series was the first to bring the franchise to 3D.  It wasn’t the first to inspire reams of outrage. To be fair, the game does allow you to pick up a hooker, bang her for extra health, then brutally murder her to get back the money you just paid for sex.  Despite (and perhaps because of) the outrage, gamers loved GTA III thanks to its solid gameplay and immersive city environments.

Remember how Daggerfall’s game map was tens of thousands of square miles in area?  GTA III somehow managed to come out 5 years later and get away with a paltry 3.  How is this travesty allowed to stand?

GTA created a dense city populated with about as realistic a citizenry as was possible at the time, then stuck the player in the middle of it.  Though most of us took this opportunity to create massive pile ups and have cop-killing contests, the fact remains that GTA succeeded by creating an environment that felt real instead of just one that felt large.

Super Metroid

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Game Map Quality: More labyrinthine than David Bowie

Let’s get this out of the way first: Super Metroid is an excellent game that far exceeds just about any other action adventure in the 16-bit generation.  It had solid gameplay and an unsettling atmosphere even in that pixelated time.  It was layered and complex, with enough tricks and turns to keep even experienced gamers on their toes.

The thing is, there’s a fine line between “challenging” and “just being hard for the sake of it”.  Super Metroid’s game map was full of back passages, subtle tricks, and tiny, insignificant details that the player needed to pick up on in order to beat the game.  When a game requires hours of aimless wandering and experimentation to find that one, completely invisible, hole in the floor that takes you to the next level, it ceases to be fun and just becomes sadistic.

World of Warcraft

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Game Map Quality: Winning in a tournament of losers

To most sane people, the world of MMORPGs is a scary time-suck that leaves us mystified as to why someone would turn gaming into a second job.  Among this shadowy alternate world, World of Warcarft is known as the “least worst”.

With a massive game world that is home (and I do mean home) to millions of players worldwide, it’s a wonder that WoW still manages to churn out quality content without turning its game map into a mess of disjointed side quests.  In addition, it has managed to toe that fine line between being big enough to inspire a sense that the player is actually part of a large, vibrant game world and still not taking hours to traverse.

Pokemon

Game Map Quality: I choose you, Monotony!

Admit it, you played this game.  It’s okay, we all liked stupid things when we were younger.  For the fortunate few out there who didn’t have to experience the raging obsession that was catching and trading Pokemon, this game consisted of random encounters designed to allow the player to “catch” and “train” ever more powerful little battle pets.  The goal was to eventually become the greatest master of forcing innocent animals to fight to the near-death for you.

The important thing to understand is that Pokemon were rarely encountered as opponents in the game in the traditional sense.  The vast majority were encountered randomly as a result of walking around in circles.  While this isn’t a terrible model for a game (hell, it’s the bread and butter of Final Fantasy), Pokemon made the mistake of giving players a game map full of an abundance of big, empty space to wander about randomly.  It’s one thing to have an open map full of random encounters, it’s another thing to have a game map so lifeless and unremarkable that it essentially turns your game into little more than a random number generator.

Mass Effect

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Game Map Quality: A galaxy without sprawl

Widely hailed as one of the best RPGs of all time, Mass Effect set a new standard of depth and storytelling for Sci-Fi.  Operatic in scope, Mass Effect tells the story of an evil race of ancient machines bent on eradicating all life in the galaxy, and the brave band of brothers that stands against them.

One of the greatest flaws of such wide-reaching stories is the inability to make the plight of the galaxy — which presumably includes trillions of life forms — seem at all personal and comprehensible.  Though Mass Effect has some truly stand-out writing (especially for a video game), its game map lends a huge helping hand in two respects.  First, every mission is accessed through the galaxy map, a gigantic interface that constantly reminds the player that every action is couched in a wider context.  Second, the maps levels are typically wide, open, and organic.  When driving around on the planets surface, players are consistently reminded that every conflict takes place in a region, on a planet, in a star cluster, just a few parsecs over from Earth.

Ocarina of Time: Water Temple

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Game Map Quality: Just plain sadistic

It’s a well-established fact that, despite all the anime weirdness of Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time is the best Zelda game ever made.  And that was 12 years ago.  Generally speaking, Ocarina of Time has a very well-constructed game map that scales up very well over the course of the story, but certain parts of this game are just plain ridiculous.

Many of you might remember the Water Temple, better known as the point in the game that you gave up.  With multiple overlapping puzzles that have no discernible connection to one another, this temple seems designed specifically to engender a sense of overwhelming hopelessness.  While normally the concept of multi-layered puzzles that amaze and challenge is exciting, when it just becomes an exercise in ”controller-snapping frustration” it’s time to rethink your map design.  Maybe another Forest Temple — that one was fun.

Doom

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Game Map Quality: The great-grandaddy of maps

Doom is well known as the game that gave birth to the most pervasive format in gaming nowadays: the first-person shooter.  Doom was so influential, for most of the 90s these games were just called “Doom Clones” — in the same way that a lot of open-world sandbox games nowadays are called “GTA Clones”.

But in our world of linear hallway shooters that have a little fit whenever you try to step outside the established path, many forget that Doom was a pretty open game that had players constantly opening the in-game map to orient themselves.  The funny thing is, even with our fully 3D-rendered worlds that don’t require floating sprites to animate enemies, Doom is still fantastically fun to play.  While this has something to do with Doom’s smooth gameplay and the immortal BFG, a big part of it has to do with the games rich game maps.  With their numerous twists, turns and hidden rooms, it’s enough to keep a jaded gamer interested even 17 years later.

Final Fantasy VIII

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Game Map Quality: Glitches and general confusion

While it often gets unfairly panned as the more tedious, red-headed step child to Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII is a generally solid addition to the series.  With a focus on cinematic moments that was well ahead of its time, Final Fantasy VIII, while not the best of the FF series, definitely has its moments.  Unfortunately, these good moments come into direct conflict the terrible game map.

At a certain point about halfway through the game, the player is given control of (surprise!) an airship capable of traveling nearly everywhere on the map.  Unfortunately, the wider game map was apparently cobbled together from broken code and a few pieces of an old shoe.  The player’s avatar is a huge, bumbling animation prone to getting stuck in the scenery far from the all-important airship–not to mention that several interesting secret areas lie on tiny slivers of land that you have to float around for a few hours trying to find that one sweet spot where the game will let you disembark.  To the game’s credit, they seemed to realize how ridiculous this whole system was, so they shoehorn in a bigger, badder airship later in the game.

Civilization

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Game Map Quality: Okay this one’s a tossup

Civilization is one of those old workhorses of PC gaming that absolutely refuses to submit to modern conventions of “not having turn-based play” and “not having shitty code that grinds the game to a halt”.  As recently as Civilization III, it was possible to conduct a game “online” by having each player send their respective moves by e-mail.
To it’s credit, Civilization is perhaps one of the most addicting games ever programmed, and this has a lot to do with its game map.  Deceptively simple, the map in recent iterations of Civilization has dozens of tiny, innocuous variables at play.  Think your chariot unit can defeat that cadre of samurai?  Tough luck, because you attacked them across a river into a forest while Jupiter was aligning with Neptune which lent them a +4 bonus as a defending unit.

Whether or not this is a fun game mechanic depends on your general outlook toward games.  To some, this is unnecessarily complex and casts aside skill for arcane knowledge of the tome-like game manual.  To others, this is exactly the sort of complex and realistic interaction they’ve always craved from a game map.  Whether you like this or not depends on your pre-established level of wonky nerdiness.

Superman 64

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Game Map Quality: BAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Who doesn’t want to be Superman?  Zipping through the buildings of Metropolis, picking up cars, hurling them at baddies, giving hope to the regular citizen.  It sounds so romantic and heroic.  Unfortunately, that isn’t anything close to what Superman 64 was.  That is unless Superman lives in on a Tron-like planet of completely formless ground interspaced with generic buildings like he’s living in the world of Starfox 64.

Widely reviled as the worst game on the Nintendo 64, Superman 64 not only had some of the worst gameplay this side of ET for the Atari, it all took place in a completely unremarkable game map that evoked memories of exactly zero cities on this planet.  It turned Superman into a clunky superhero completely incapable of aiming his freeze-breath, living in a world without a single outside character that he is supposed to give a damn about.  That sounds like a recipe for a superhero who just randomly chucks heavy objects into buildings, which is exactly what everyone started doing after owning this game for more than 5 minutes.

Fallout 3

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Game Map Quality: Transcendent

Set in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC, there are plenty of reasons to love Fallout 3 aside from the presumed incineration of most of Congress.  Its innovative VATS system was a way to combine an RPG progression with a first-person shooter.  Its open world system encouraged exploration and ambiguous morality.  But more than anything else, Fallout 3 was a game that was defined by its game map.

To anyone who has ever lived in DC, playing Fallout 3 is a somewhat jarring, depressing endeavor.  The game recreates the capitol landscape with an eerie accuracy, to the point where you can walk out of a subway station in the game and point out more than a few buildings that you pass on your way to work in the morning.  Toward the beginning of the game there is a point at which your character is expelled from the safety of the giant bomb shelter that he or she grew up in.  There’s a moment where your eyes adjust to the bright, barren wasteland and most players utter a barely audible “shit just got real”.

Not only does the game map scale up wonderfully throughout the game thanks to the fast travel system that allows you to quickly jet between known locations but forces foot travel to new areas, but the whole capitol wasteland is just straight depressing.  The entire length of the game, you are confronted with images of an optimistic, progressive 50’s-era culture contrasted with a starving, brutal, destitute culture of barbarians and mutants.  And the entire time, the player is forced to look at a bleak horizon of charred, barren rock, with little to no hope of safety or solace.  This is a game that realized that the game map is a character all its own, and it used it to create a pervasive ambiance of hostility and desperation.  So, not all that far from modern Washington DC.